Technical Field
This disclosure relates to methods and systems supporting online advertising. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to providing on-line advertising with dynamic content.
Related Art
An increasingly popular way of delivering on-line (e.g. Internet) advertisements is to tie the presentation of advertisements to particular user behaviors. Such user behaviors include user access to a particular web page, user selection (also called mouse-clicking or clicking) of a particular location on a web page, user entry of a particular search string or keyword, and the like. In order to target advertising accurately, advertisers or vendors pay to have their advertisements presented in response to certain kinds of events—that is, their advertisements are presented when particular user behaviors warrant such presentation. If a particular advertisement (ad) leads to some user action, an advertiser may receive remuneration for the ad.
Using other systems and processes on the Web, users can search for goods and services via the Internet and shop, bid, or make purchases of goods or services over the Internet in real time. On-line shopping, and especially on-line auctions or bidding, can cause rapid and frequent changes in information related to particular products and/or services offered by on-line merchants or in on-line auctions. For example, the bidding price of an item at auction can change by the minute. However, there is a significant latency between the creation of an ad related to a product/service and the publishing of the ad on the Internet for shoppers or bidders. This makes it difficult to create ads for products/services that may have associated information that gets stale (e.g. goes out of date) quickly (e.g. price, or product/service availability information). Unfortunately, conventional systems only serve static advertisements that may not contain updated dynamic content that includes the latest information available for related goods and/or services.
Conventional ad servers use static advertisements with static content created by an advertiser. These types of ads can quickly go out of date. Hence, conventional ads can only lead a user to another website or another item page where the user can get up-to-date information related to the ad and the products/services being offered by the ad.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,061 discloses methods and apparatuses for targeting the delivery of advertisements over a network such as the Internet. Statistics are compiled on individual users and networks and the use of the advertisements is tracked to permit targeting of the advertisements of individual users. In response to requests from affiliated sites, an advertising server transmits to people accessing the page of a site an appropriate one of the advertisements based upon profiling of users and networks. However, the served advertisement does not have updated dynamic content that includes the latest information available for related goods and/or services.
Thus, a computer-implemented system and method for providing on-line advertising with dynamic content is needed.